GUEST POST: “Why Data Centers Don’t Need an Environmental Impact Assessment”

By Stefanie Werinos

 

The protest against the Google data center in Kronstorf, which has been under construction since April, is sending a strong message. The demand for data centers is high. A data center is scheduled to be built in Leopoldsdorf near Vienna starting in 2027, and other large-scale projects are in the planning stages.

The fact is: A data center isn’t built in just a few months. In Google’s case, nearly 18 years will have passed between the purchase of the property in 2008 and the groundbreaking in 2026. After years of negotiations, construction was approved last year. That’s because anyone who wants to build a data center needs numerous permits under specific laws enacted at both the federal and state levels.

In addition to the land-use plan for the required zoning, the building code and the commercial code are particularly crucial. Among other things, structural stability, fire safety, and the character of the local area are assessed, as well as noise, emissions, and potential hazards to the neighborhood. If groundwater is extracted for cooling or heated water is discharged into groundwater or surface water bodies—as is planned in Kronstorf—then water law applies with its own volume and temperature limits, and aquatic ecologists assess, among other things, the impact on fish populations. If the property is located on forest land, a clearing permit under forestry law is required—not to mention any necessary approvals under nature conservation law. The grid connection is subject to electricity law, which has its own capacity rules for large consumers; the Energy Efficiency Act requires annual reports on consumption and waste heat; and there are also NIS 2 obligations regarding cybersecurity. This represents a more rigorous regulatory framework than many other industrial facilities are required to undergo.

Protected assets recorded

So why the call for an additional EIA category? The trigger is the submission of plans for additional construction phases, which are intended to expand the project. Nevertheless, the discussion about a separate category for data centers misses the point.

Whether a construction project requires an EIA depends solely on whether it is explicitly listed in the Environmental Impact Assessment Act (UVP-G) or its Annex 1 and meets the relevant thresholds, such as land use, parking spaces, capacity, emissions, or similar criteria. This generally includes large shopping centers with an area of more than ten hectares or more than 1,000 parking spaces, as well as logistics centers. The reason: Only once these thresholds are reached is it assumed that the interactions between water, soil, landscape, air, and people require a holistic assessment.

Data centers do not appear on this list—there is no legal basis, no threshold, to which they could be linked. However, protected resources such as water, soil, landscape, and air are still covered—but specifically by the substantive laws created precisely for that purpose: water law for water, forestry and nature conservation law for soil and landscape, and commercial law for emissions. An additional EIA is therefore neither required nor appropriate.

Criticism Regarding Energy

The actual point of criticism regarding data centers—energy consumption—is not, in fact, a protected interest under the EIA Act. The EIA Act covers energy generation facilities—power plants, wind farms, thermal power plants—above certain capacity thresholds because their construction and operation can themselves cause direct environmental impacts. A data center does not generate energy; it consumes it. How much electricity a facility requires is a matter of grid capacity—regulated, among other things, by electricity law—and a fundamental issue of Austrian energy policy, but it is not a matter of whether an EIA applies.

That doesn’t mean the concerns are unfounded. Land use, grid bottlenecks, and the management of waste heat are legitimate policy issues. However, the EIA is the wrong tool for this: It is neither a needs assessment nor a cost-benefit analysis. It does not answer whether a data center makes economic sense or generates added value—social, macroeconomic, regional economic, political, or other interests are not within its scope of review. It is a cross-sectoral assessment conducted where project impacts can accumulate and, above all, converge in an uncontrolled manner—not where interactions between protected resources are foreseeable and are already being evaluated as part of the relevant specialized procedure. This is the case with a data center: The effects on water, soil, landscape, and air are partially interlinked but can still be addressed within the respective sector-specific legislation. The solution therefore lies in potentially tightening the existing sector-specific laws, as has already been done, for example, in Lower Austria’s Spatial Planning Act. Anyone who resorts to mandating an EIA in this context is confusing symbolic politics with legal doctrine.